[hnkimb3558]

Post author here.

First off, I really appreciated your frank blog post on the RethinkDB post mortem. The distillation of years of experience is incredibly valuable for us, and I'm sure for many others.

I agree that the database market is crowded with solid offerings. However, I believe that differentiating features do still matter and there will be tremendous growth in the database market for the foreseeable future. In your blog post you listed the metrics of goodness which you optimized for, perhaps incorrectly. You indeed had amazing execution on those original metrics. We have paid RethinkDB the compliment of doing our best to emulate the standards set with simplicity and consistency, in particular. You are also correct that the alternate metrics including timely arrival, palpable speed, and a use case are probably better ones to optimize for in an entrepreneurial setting.

We have been optimizing from the start for a still-small use case, but one which is likely to become a top of mind concern for every major enterprise over the next five years: building global, "multihomed" services. This is something Google has pioneered over the past decade, but which remains an elusive challenge for most everyone else. For an interesting read, check out https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... (tl;dr here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/2/23/googles-transition...)

You mention AWS/GCloud as existential risks for a cloud DBaaS offering. I would take that a step further and cite them as the biggest risk to all database companies. We must compete with them both by pushing the boundaries of what the database can accomplish, and by aggressively driving an anti-vendor-lockin message: embracing a proprietary cloud DBaaS offering is an unacceptable risk if there are non-proprietary alternatives.